Quantum MEP hydrodynamical model for charge transport

TL;DR

This paper develops a quantum hydrodynamical model for charge transport in semiconductors and graphene using a quantum Maximum Entropy Principle, providing explicit quantum corrections beyond equilibrium assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a general quantum MEP hydrodynamical model for charge transport in arbitrary energy bands, extending previous models limited to specific cases.

Findings

Derived explicit quantum corrections at order ^2 for silicon and graphene.

Removed the equilibrium Wigner function limitation in quantum corrections.

Applied the model to compute quantum corrections to mobilities.

Abstract

A well known procedure to get quantum hydrodynamical models for charge transport is to resort to the Wigner equations and deduce the hierarchy of the moment equations as in the semiclassical approach. If one truncates the moment hierarchy to a finite order, the resulting set of balance equations requires some closure assumption because the number of unknowns exceed the number of equations. In the classical and semiclassical kinetic theory a sound approach to get the desired closure relations is that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle (MEP) [13] (see[20] for charge transport in semiconductors). In [9] a quantum MEP hydrodynamical model has been devised for charge transport in the parabolic band approximation by introducing quantum correction based on the equilibrium Wigner function [30]. An extension to electron moving in pristine graphene has been obtained in [29]. Here we present a quantum hydrodynamical model which is valid for a general energy band considering a closure of the moment system deduced by the Wigner equation resorting to a quantum version of MEP. Explicit formulas for quantum correction at order \hbar^2 are obtained with the aid of the Moyal calculus for silicon and graphene removing the limitation that the quantum corrections are based on the equilibrium Wigner function as in [9, 29]. As an application, quantum correction to the mobilities are deduced.